Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✩✩
by Nadine Djoury, Brandon Hackett, Devon Hyland, Colin Munch, Ann Pornel & Allana Reoch, directed by Leslie Seiler
The Second City, 51 Mercer Street, Toronto
August 23, 2017-March 3, 2018
Banana: “The bruises are the sweetest part”
In Party Today, Panic Tomorrow, its 80th mainstage revue, The Second City has had to confront an unusual situation in its 44-year history. Its revues are intended to run for three to four months, but the new administration in the White House has been producing such huge volumes of satire-worthy material per day ever since it came into power that even daily satirical news shows on television cannot keep up. How then can a stage revue with a long run hope to deal with such a situation?
The answer is to give up any attempt at topicality and focus on those aspects of life in late 2017 that are long-lasting. The Second City has guessed, perhaps rightly, that people are already tired of presidential antics dominating the news day in and day out and go to see a review to seek relief in laughter rather than re-engagement with the latest scandals. The description of the show on the troupe’s website says outright the this “all-new sketch revue knows that when you’re suffering from political exhaustion, sometimes you just need to scream over board games, settle scores with dance-offs, and get life advice from a giant banana”.
While we can understand this stance, it’s a pity that the new revue, compared to its predecessor, Everything Is Great Again, is so hit-and-miss and not very well shaped. As befits the title partying with a sense of doom in the background provides the overall structure of the new review. The first sketch is set up as a live instructional video about how to hold a party during a nuclear attack, modelled on the old bomb shelter videos that used to run on television in the 1950s. One might think that director Leslie Seiler would use this as a frame for the show, but instead the second part of the nuclear party video appears part way through Act 2. This has the awkward effect of making each of the succeeding sketches feel as if it must be the last so that the show seems to end several times before it finally finishes.
In typical Second City fashion the review sneaks in its few references to current news even as makes fun of topicality-avoidance in general. In a recurring segment a cast member points out that a video on YouTube of a bear (Brandon Hackett) with his head stuck in a bucket or later a chicken (Ann Pornel) has received more hits than any other video related to (insert important current event). Colin Munch plays a hyper vlogger who with zippy sound effects sums up what are the top-trending tweets on Twitter. They are not about (again insert important current event), but about some trivial incident involving today’s “stars”, some of whom, as in the top tweet, even the vlogger has never heard of. Other than using these two formats, the revue includes only one outright Trump joke and one reference to Game of Thrones.
Four members of Everything Is Great Again return – Brandon Hackett, Devon Hyland, Colin Munch and Ann Pornel – and are joined by two new members – Nadine Djoury and Allana Reoch. Of the troupe four, though not the ones you would expect, have several skits in which they really shine.
Brandon Hackett is especially good as a rapper pushed to apologize for offensive remarks and lyrics in his songs in order to promote his new album. The trouble is that he can’t finish an apology to one group without offending another. Hackett catches just the right level of insincerity, as we’ve all heard in these case, with every apology.
Allana Reoch’s greatest achievement may be to play the father of the bride (Ann Pornel). The father, is an extreme example of many men who find it difficult to express their emotions. The greatest passion of the father Reoch plays is the Toronto Blue Jays, so the poor man awkwardly accesses the feeling he wants to express by conjuring up a play at a Blue Jays game that gave him a similar feeling. At first you think there’s no way the fresh-faced Reoch could play an older man, but she dispels that notion with seconds.
Nadine Djoury’s funniest skit is as a sleepless wife. Her demands of her hapless husband (Devon Hyland) to help her sleep first begin as reasonable but soon become increasing persnickety and bizarre. Djoury’s woman may be an extreme case, but we’ve all known people like her.
A surprising number of sketches, however, go nowhere. In one Colin Munch plays a depressed father whom a bartender (Devon Hyland) would like to kick out when it’s closing time but just can’t. The awkwardness of the situation is well observed but the character of the father is really not that sympathetic or even interesting. In another sketch a wine connoisseur (Brandon Hackett) goes into a Wine Rack to find an enthusiastic employee (Devon Hyland) who knows only what wines he’s supposed to push and nothing else. When the connoisseur asks a serous wine question, the employee flails about and calls for help but even the manager (Ann Pornel) can’t help. This leads to an unconvincing ending.
There also are sketches that have great potential but aren’t written clearly enough to make their point. In one the troupe uses an old standby of a fictional game show, this time called “Wolves”, hosted by Devon Hyland. Hyland tells us about a minor infraction committed by each of three unlucky contestants and the audience decides whether they deserve to be thrown to actual wolves for their “crime”. Of course, the audience decides to doom each of the three. The point, however, is that only after the contestant is torn apart and eaten, does the host tell us what the contestants have devoted their lives to. One, for instance, works for Médecins sans Frontières. As with the earlier satires of silly viral videos and irrelevant top tweets, This sketch could have underlined the nasty tendency that has grown up, especially on the internet both on the left and the right, of focussing on a trivial act of an important person as if that one imperfection negates all the great achievements that person has done.
Some group sketches use an overly familiar template as when the troupe solicits a brand name and a product from the audience and tries to work it into every line of its production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women. Another time a potentially good sketch when a fiercely arguing couple (Ann Pornel and Devon Hyland) win at a charades match, finishes with an over-explanatory conclusion. Nevertheless, Second City still can produce fine observational sketches that are relevant to any time or place. In one of the best Colin Munch pays a young man has important news that he wants to tell his family. He communicates with them via Skype (projected above the stage), but all five members of the family are so preoccupied with their own concerns that Munch never gets to tell them his news.
Moving beyond the tried and true, a couple of sketches do work to push the boundaries of what can be a subject for comedy. In one short blackout scene, Brandon Hackett mimes a black man getting shot by police when he is just trying to reach for his wallet. The sketch does have a comic punchline, but it’s so biting that it’s likely to cause a sharp intake of breath rather than a laugh. In a longer form skit in the second half, the three women of the troupe strip off their clothes to their underwear to the whoops of the crowd saying that they wanting to show the men in the audience what they know they’ve been fantasizing about. Then the three sit down and proceed to tell us a real but embarrassing fact about their bodies, most of which we’d really rather not know. Thus, any turning-on that the stripping might have caused is immediately negated by real-world details. This daring skit not only demonstrates that men’s fantasies about women’s bodies really are only fantasies but also shows how any straight-talk about women’s bodies paradoxically seems to inspire only an adverse reaction.
More sketches like these two would have helped make Party Today, Panic Tomorrow an edgier show that would suit the daily distress that the news causes today. The show is consciously escapist, even if it makes fun of escapism in a time like this. It still needs tightening and a clearer structure and could have made the tension between the relief and the guilt of seeing an escapist show much stronger and thus have made the whole show more incisive and more powerful and, likely, much funnier. If the Giant Banana is right, “The bruises are the sweetest part”.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Allana Reoch and Ann Pornel; Nadine Djoury, Allana Reoch, Colin Munch, Brandon Hackkett, Devon Hyland and Ann Pornel; Nadine Djoury, Devon Hyland, Ann Pornel (in front), Colin Munch, Brandon Hackkett and Allana Reoch (in back). ©2017 Racheal McCaig..
For tickets, visit www.secondcity.com/shows/toronto/party-today-panic-tomorrow.
2017-08-31
Party Today, Panic Tomorrow